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Sidhu's failure to stop set up a roller-coaster week in Melfort

Author of the article:

Kevin Mitchell • Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Publishing date:

February 1, 2019 • 4 minute read

Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, driver of the truck that struck the bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos hockey team is shown during his sentencing hearing in a courtroom sketch, in Melfort, Sask., on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2019.Cloudesley Rook-Hobbs/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

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MELFORT — The signs he drove past did not register in his brain. He forgot the road, didn’t see the crossroads. The bus was invisible to him.

Jaskirat Singh Sidhu was worried about a troublesome tarp on his semi. That’s as close to an explanation as we have; this idea of a distracted truck driver focusing on what was behind, rather than what lay ahead. Then he’s on his side, climbing through a door that’s now facing up, listening to chaos and watching it unfold.

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“I came out of the truck and heard the kids crying,” Sidhu said Thursday in a makeshift courtroom during a sentencing hearing focusing on the 16 people he killed, and the 13 he injured, in the April 6 Humboldt Broncos’ crash.

Sidhu’s lawyer, Mark Brayford, filled things in even further.

“Until he climbed up the door that was now above him on his truck, and looked around, he had no idea that he’d gone through an intersection, he had no idea what had happened. He didn’t know why his truck was on its side,” Brayford said.

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Unadulterated horror accompanies this picture of a bewildered bus driver who inexplicably didn’t stop at the intersection of Highways 35 and 335 — this inexperienced man, married just a few months, peeking from the top of his semi into carnage.

Chris Beaudry, then a Broncos assistant coach, wasn’t on the bus. He drove to the scene 15 minutes later, everything surreal. His mind detached.

Beaudry said during his Wednesday victim-impact statement that he thought those packages of peat moss, scattered everywhere, “were hockey bags and I couldn’t understand why we had so many bags.”

They asked him to identify bodies in the morgue, because he was the only person left who could do it.

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He remembers how the chill in that morgue — “nothing like the cold of a winter’s day” — burrowed into his bones and stayed for months.

He recounted “the sounds of bones being set, skin being sewn, and the zipping of body bags.”

There were “the bodies of two of my boys who hadn’t been cleaned yet. Their faces bloodied and bruised and close to unrecognizable.

“Small pieces of me,” he added, “were torn away as I moved from body to body.”

That’s one small story in a million — “unparalleled” is the way Crown prosecutor Thomas Healey describes the aftermath — and all because of a professionally-licensed driver who he says “utterly and completely failed.”

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Sidhu wasn’t ready to drive a truck with two trailers, by himself, on unfamiliar Saskatchewan secondary highways. His defence readily conceded that fact. His training was short, and three weeks after being hired, he was driving on his own into a province he scarcely knew.

“He was in way over his head,” Brayford said, but in the end, it came down to this driver who didn’t stop, qualified or not. Brayford couldn’t explain it, apart from that tarp, which is thin gruel indeed.

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Sidhu missed five signs, altogether, before meeting that bus: A junction sign 406 metres from the intersection, a yellow “Stop Sign Ahead,” a green directional sign (Tisdale one way, Nipawin the other), a blue sign marking the intersecting highway numbers, then the stop sign itself — oversized, four feet in diameter, adorned with red flashing lights.

He faced a parked car on the other side of the highway, sitting still, waiting for the Broncos bus to exercise its right-of-way.

Glen Doerksen, the Broncos’ bus driver, tried to stop, leaving a trail of rubber leading up the collision. But he had nowhere to go, because Sidhu’s truck covered the entire width of the highway. And Sidhu didn’t stop at all — no application of the brakes; just a “rocket,” as Healey put it, destroying bus and bodies.

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That inability to stop was a steady theme through the week as families gave their victim impact statements.

Why didn’t you stop. All you had to do was stop. Stop, stop, stop.

“It wouldn’t have happened,” Michelle Straschnitzki wrote in her victim impact statement, “if Mr. Sidhu had simply stopped, as everyone who drives any kind of motor vehicle should do at a Big Red Stop Sign.”

Sidhu said sorry on Thursday, preceded by five “so”s.

“I take full responsibility of what has happened,” he told the court and the assembled family members. “It happened because of my lack of experience, and I am so, so, so, so, so sorry.”

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Sidhu is remorseful, and he avoided a gruelling trial by pleading guilty earlier this month.

Many family members have already indicated a willingness to forgive. Some say they’re there already, others hope to work toward it. Some people say they’ll never forgive him.

Defence lawyer Mark Brayford told court that those harrowing victim impact statements — 90, altogether, most of them read aloud, spread over three days — ensure Sidhu, unlike many prisoners, will carry no self-pity with him into his cell. He knows full well what people connected to this crash have endured.

Sentencing takes place March 22 in Melfort. Judge Inez Cardinal has a difficult task in front of her — no real precedent of this magnitude, and a world of factors to weigh on both sides.

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The Crown seeks 10 years. Brayford presented case law with sentences in the rage of one and a half to four and a half years.

Everyone, from Sidhu on down, can agree with Healey’s sentiments as he talked about this tough, tough week in Melfort.

“As we’ve heard over the last few days, all he had to do was stop,” he said. “That’s all. Just stop. We wouldn’t even be here today.”

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